Qualcomm's John Smee told Fierce that 6G air interface work will start in 2025
Lab tests will take place through 2027, with trials starting in 2028
Players are starting to plan re-use of the 4G LTE FDD bands below 1 GHz
The 6G air – or radio – interface will be one of the crucial aspects of the new cellular standard, the development of which is going to start to be studied in the second half of 2025.
The radio interface will be one of the first key new parts of the standard, which will be developed between 2025 and 2029. The cellular air interface is the radio frequency (RF) part of the circuit between the wireless modem on the cellular phone and the base station.
The 3GPP will lead development work on 6G. The first 3GPP release that contains actual 6G work will be Release 21. The 3GPP has just completed – or frozen – the first 5G-Advanced specification this past August and is now working on Release 19. Release 20 also will be focused on 5G-Advanced.
Work on studying the 6G radio interface is expected to start after Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona in the second half of 2025, John Smee, senior VP of engineering and global head of wireless research at Qualcomm, told Fierce on a call last week. He said that Qualcomm and its partners at the 3GPP are starting to “design a new air interface that’s not backwards-compatible – that’s the G definition right there – it means we’re designing a new waveform to enable new devices to offer that next level of performance,” Smee said.
He expects that this kind of new RF interface will initially get discussed as part of a big 6G workshop that will take place in early 2025 and then tested as a study item as the radio access network (RAN) parts of 6G get hammered out in the later half of 2025, through into 2026 and into part of 2027. In 2028 and 2029, the lab tests will move into field trials in preparation of a commercial 6G launch in 2030, Smee said.
“Definitely, it’s a jam-packed next five years ahead of that 2030 commercial deployment,” Smee said.
In particular, Smee expects that 6G will be designed with more spectral efficiency, more coverage and capacity. He said that some older frequency bands – notably the FDD bands that use one channel for radio uplink and one for radio downlink – that were extensively used in the 4G LTE era will likely get a new lease of life. “We can design 6G to improve FDD bands, that is bands below one gigahertz and between one and two gigahertz ... really bringing in that coverage part,” Smee said.
This will be an important point for 6G, said Joe Madden, lead analyst at Mobile Experts, in an email to Fierce.
"For bands below 1 GHz, I agree, upgrades from LTE or 5G to 6G are likely," he said. "Mobile operators have been very clear, however, that they will only invest in upgrades that utilize previously deployed hardware and allow for smooth transitions from one format to the next. In practice, this means that the 6G air interface must be very similar to 4G and 5G, so that dynamic spectrum sharing can be done and the existing radio hardware can be re-used."
On the capacity side, Smee said that making sure that the upper 6 GHz, 7 GHz and 8 GHz bands can be used for capacity in macro cellular deployments will be important. His comments echo some of the statements made at the Brooklyn 6G Summit, where speakers and attendees talked about re-using some spectrum that had been used for 4G. Even frequency-hopping radios that used small segments of the sub-6 GHz mid-band spectrum were put forward.
Madden noted that operators are dead set against a heavy spend on upgrading from to 5G to 6G. "In many cases, the operators will upgrade to 6G in the lower bands with software upgrades, without buying tens of billions of dollars of network equipment," he said. "Improvements in capacity and spectral efficiency will be minimal, so the 6G spending may not come in a big wave as in 2G through 5G."
See more of our B6GS coverage here.
Fierce is also holding its own 6G virtual summit on December 3rd and 4th.